Summary

GPX tracks lighting up the map in Guinea

This past year, the American Red Cross undertook its biggest field effort to date: launching a mapping hub in West Africa and training about 100 local volunteers to visit 7,000 villages in the border regions of Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone. The mapping focused on public health resources, different aspects of vulnerability, and amenities like markets that would draw people across borders – important information to understand if another outbreak were to occur.

The volunteers logged GPX tracks as they conducted the field mapping. Combined, the tracks add up to 70,000 kilometres of roads and paths travelled by the volunteers.

Here's an excerpt from the data for Forécariah, Guinea (map). Data like these have helped us to add missing roads to the network in OSM - which has been especially important for areas with cloudy satellite imagery.

This is a Featured image, which means that it has been identified as one of the best examples of OpenStreetMap mapping, or that it provides a useful illustration of the OpenStreetMap project. If you know another image of similar quality, you can nominate it on Featured image proposals.

Front-page image for week 50 of 2016 (12–18 Dec.).

Image descriptions

English : Local volunteers trained by the American Red Cross have mapped 7,000 villages in the border regions of Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone. A total of 70,000 kilometres of roads and paths, including this example, Forécariah in Guinea.